• Alan Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges, now playing at 59E59 Theaters through July 1 as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is the talk of Manhattan—or at least that part of Manhattan whose residents go to the theater fairly often. I raved about it in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, describing it as “a cycle of eight head-bangingly funny plays that leaves no possible doubt of Mr. Ayckbourn’s seriousness—or his ingenuity.” Alas, Intimate Exchanges, like most of Ayckbourn’s 70-odd plays, is (A) out of print in the U.S. and (B) doesn’t read nearly as well as it acts, while Alain Resnais’ French-language film version, Smoking/No Smoking, is not available on video. If you can possibly get to Intimate Exchanges, or any other Ayckbourn play, by all means do so. (Relatively Speaking, one of his earlier efforts, is playing at Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse July 12-28.)

And if not? Then allow me to direct you to The Crafty Art of Playmaking (Palgrave/Macmillan, 173 pp., $22.95). Practicing artists rarely take the time to sit down and write books about how they do what they do—they’re usually too busy doing it. I don’t know what possessed Ayckbourn to make himself an exception to that rule, but his nuts-and-bolts guide to playwriting and directing, originally published in 2002, is one of the most readable and revealing books ever written about the stage.

Part of what makes it so interesting, of course, is that it’s not so much a how-to-do-it book as a how-Ayckbourn-does-it book. He is best known for writing comedies with unhappy endings about members of the British middle class who are too proper to get what they want out of life, and The Crafty Art of Playmaking contains several sections that shed light on that fascinating preference:

We often dismiss our light comedies and farces as trivia with nothing to say. With the successful ones, this is generally untrue. . . . We are most of us by nature secretive creatures. We guard our inner selves carefully—even sometimes from those we love. In making characters reveal themselves they must be given a cause, a motive. The classic, slightly corny one is to get them drunk. Otherwise, they probably only open up through desperation, or anger, or deliberately to hurt each other or, most usually, because they’ve no idea they’re doing it.

But Ayckbourn, who has been running a Yorkshire theater company for the past quarter-century in between writing plays, is a pragmatist who never lets his private obsessions stand in the way of getting the curtain up, and most of the 101 “obvious rules” that are the heart of The Crafty Art of Playmaking are universally applicable to any production of anything: “Information gleaned indirectly by an audience is far more effective. . . . Explore the unsaid. If it’s clear enough the actor will say it for you. . . . Concentrate on the truth of the scene. Let the comedy take care of itself.”

In addition to these rules, The Crafty Art of Playmaking is salted with acute observations gleaned from hard experience, some aphoristic (“Charm is very difficult to write”) and others illuminatingly expansive:

There is no requirement for the actors to be consciously “funny.” On the contrary, there’s no quicker way to kill the comedy should they attempt to be. . . . If you ever see an actor giving a scene of yours a helping hand with a bit of extra comic business, there can be one of three reasons for this: either the scene is badly written, or it has been misunderstood and misdirected, or it’s being played by a poor or unconfident actor with no judgment.

Reading this brief book in tandem with the equally penetrating Notes on Directing, by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich (RCR Creative Press, 160 pp., $19.95), is the next best thing to watching a play being rehearsed.